8 ways SharePoint 2010 can help internal communications
July 9, 2012 at 8:41 am | Posted in best practice, collaboration, communication, engagement, intranet, podcast, rss, SharePoint 2010, wiki | 7 CommentsTags: blog, collaboration, communication, engagement, intranet, sharepoint 2010, social media, wiki
I have covered in previous posts how internal communications can improve with collaboration tools. I also believe SharePoint 2010 can help organisations’ intranets if applied well. This post covers 8 ways that SP 2010 can help internal communications.
I’m not saying that SP 2010 is the only way to improve internal comms or intranets generally. There are other technologies that can do this as well or better. It is how you use the technology that is critical to it being a success.
These 8 ways can help SharePoint 2010 make a difference to internal communications by offering more agile and tailored solutions to meet the organisation’s needs:
- Polls: you can use polls to ask for feedback on a subject with a menu of answers for people to choose from.
- News: you can tailor a section of a page to show as many stories as you want. You can give people the choice to see extra news and mandate how many news stories they must see and how many are optional.
- News stories: people can read these and show how they feel by using the SP 2010 features to like and rate the stories.
- Share news stories: people can also share a story with people who will be interested. This is usually by email like with internet sites.
- Tag news stories: people can also tag a story with words or phrases that group it with other information or news they can find easily in future. Tags can also be shared with other people and their tags can create a folksonomy.
- Discussion forums: people are able to extend their feedback on the news story by discussing it further with other people. Internal communicators can also join the discussion and help explain any points that are unclear to people.
- Blogs: people (including internal communicators) can give a personal view on a news story. Again it extends the original message if someone feels strongly about or offers an opinion to challenge another view. This can help tease out small issues that can be quickly resolved before they can become major issues later that are more complex and harder to sort out.
- Podcasts: internal communicators can show and tell how to do something to help illustrate a message better than using words. This is different from high quality corporate videos. The quality may be lower but much cheaper and normally accepted by people. It is the informal, personal, style that can make a positive difference to people’s perceptions.
The real benefits with SharePoint 2010 are when you use it on a major scale. If you create the content to be communicated once, then be able to re-use it across many channels, you can focus on quality of the message. You can communicate it as a news article, mobile text, video/podcast, etc. and get feedback from discussion forums, polls, rating, comments, shares and likes to it.
Have you found any of these have helped you?
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8 ways SharePoint 2010 can help internal communications « Mark Morrell Intranet Pioneer…
This article has been submitted to Intranet Lounge – Trackback from Intranet Lounge…
Trackback by Intranet Lounge— July 9, 2012 #
Reblogged this on My side of the story.
Comment by cvieira21— July 9, 2012 #
Reblogged this on My side of the story.
Comment by cvieira21— July 9, 2012 #
Reblogged this on My side of the story.
Comment by cvieira21— July 9, 2012 #
We use most of the above on our SharePoint 2010 though the polls/survey feature is a bit weak in look & feel as are the discussion forums. Hopefully the next version of SP will improve surveys, blogs and the discussion functionality.
We use comment web parts on many of our news stories as well which does work well and allows people to ask questions or give feedback.
Comment by Andrew Gilleran— July 12, 2012 #
I believe the strength of SharePoint 2010 is the wide range of features it offers out of the box rather than how good they are.
I agree there is room for improvement that Microsoft build into future versions.
Thanks for your comments.
Comment by Mark Morrell— July 13, 2012 #
Reblogged this on Errol A. Adams, J.D. M.L.S' Blog.
Comment by Errol A. Adams, J.D., M.L.S.— July 19, 2012 #